'Harry Potter' Inspires a Christian Alternative

By DINITIA SMITH

Published: July 24, 2004

Correction Appended

G. P. Taylor, an Anglican vicar, onetime roadie for the Sex Pistols and former all-around sinner, was roaring across the Yorkshire moors on his Yamaha XV1100 in a lightning storm when the idea for his hit Christian children's book, "Shadowmancer," came to him.

Like some other committed Christians, he had been disturbed by the amount of witchcraft and the occult in children's literature. "Harry Potter," for instance. The best-selling author J. K. Rowling gives too much power to the forces of evil in her books, he told parishioners. Well, one congregant replied, why not write your own book then?

So Mr. Taylor created a story deeply imbued with Christian imagery and set on the 18th-century Yorkshire coast in Britain with its rugged cliffs, hidden caves and smuggler's legends. It is about an evil vicar, Obadiah Demurral, who tries to take over the world but is thwarted by three teenagers and a smuggler.

When "Shadowmancer" was first published in Britain last year, it was soon dubbed the Christian alternative to "Harry Potter" and surged to the top of the paperback best-seller list, outranking its secular rivals, the "Harry Potter" books, for 15 weeks in a row. And in May when "Shadowmancer" was published in the United States by G. P. Putnam's Sons, it beat "Harry Potter" for six weeks straight on the children's chapter-book best-seller list of The New York Times. There are 300,000 copies in print, and now booksellers are eagerly expecting a similar success when the sequel, "Wormwood," is published here in September.

Some of those sales have been fueled by the Christian media, which has hailed the "Christian Harry Potter" for its religious references and its celebration of God's power. Mr. Taylor's American promotional tour not only included the predictable appearance on the "Today" show, for instance, but also an interview with Pat Robertson on the Christian Broadcasting Network's "700 Club." A reviewer for Pluggedin.com, the online magazine of the conservative Christian group "Focus on the Family," wrote, "It could be just the thing to counter Harry Potter's magic." And while Christianity Today magazine was more critical, it nonetheless credited "Shadowmancer" for showing "something that some of the others do not — characters relentlessly calling on God to shine his light into the shadows."

That was what attracted Anne Pouns of Houston, who describes herself as a born-again Christian. She had not allowed her children, who are now teenagers, to read "Harry Potter" when they were young, and hadn't read the series herself. "I don't desire to have it in my hands because of the witchcraft," she said.

But Ms. Pouns said she found "Shadowmancer" to be "a very fascinating book. It reminds me of `Lord of the Rings' and C. S. Lewis. If you have a knowledge of Scripture, you will realize how much he has interspersed the story with it."

Michelle Black, who works at His Way Christian Bookstore in Eldersburg, Md., said she also tried to avoid books containing references to the occult or to gods and goddesses, and appreciated the Christian message of "Shadowmancer."

In the beginning, for instance, an Ethiopian boy, Raphah, washes up on the coast bearing a fragment of the ark of the covenant. "He's willing to sacrifice his very life to prevent the darkness from overtaking the world," Ms. Black said. "It's like when Christ said, `Greater love hath no man than this, that a man should lay down his life for his friends.' "

Yet Mr. Taylor, who says he was influenced by the X-rated rapper Eminem as well as Jesus, insists he didn't set out to write a book against "Harry Potter." He has never even read the "Potter" books, he says, though he has seen the films. "I liked parts of them," he said on the telephone from Yorkshire, "though I found some of them theologically a bit difficult to handle."

" `Shadowmancer' isn't an alternative to `Harry Potter,' " he says, adding that he was simply writing "as a Christian."

Still, Mr. Taylor describes himself as a committed Christian who has ministered for two decades to those involved in the occult. "Shadowmancer," he says, shows that the true power in the universe is God.

Mr. Taylor, 46, was not always moved by evangelical fervor. Much of his youth was spent, he said, in the precincts of "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll."

His father, Frank, was profoundly deaf, a shoe repairman or, in Mr. Taylor's words, "a mender of soles." ("I am a mender of souls," the large and jolly Mr. Taylor likes to say.) His mother, Mary, was severely hearing impaired and worked in a cafeteria. As a child, Mr. Taylor learned to communicate with them by watching them talk to each other in sign language.

The family, which included two sisters, lived in a government housing project. When he was 13, Mr. Taylor was expelled from school. "I hung a friend out the window," he said, "set fire to the desks. I'd taken a radiator off the wall, dyed my hair bright red."

At 15 he moved out of the house, lived with a girlfriend and became part of the punk rock scene, imbibing quantities of drugs and alcohol. "It was good fun," he said. "But it was stupid and dangerous."